Migrating to VoIP - What to Look for in a new Vendor

In my last post, I presented four scenarios that cover most situations in terms of the types of vendors you’ll be migrating from and to for VoIP. This can be a helpful way to look at your options, as the dynamics are quite different between Tier 1 and Tier 2 vendors.

These considerations are independent of the technologies around VoIP, and have more to do with the business relationship you’re about to enter into. All things considered, any of these VoIP vendors can do a good job selling you a phone system, but that’s really just the start of your journey.

As noted earlier in this series, the migration to VoIP really is a journey, especially if you’ve been using legacy telephony for a long time. TDM may be the only service you’ve ever known, and since you probably grew up with it both at work and in your personal life, it’s pretty much hard-wired in your thinking about telephony.

In this regard, the migration to VoIP could be a bigger transition than you may realize, making the choice of vendor all the more important. Regardless of tier level, there are some basic elements you’ll need to evaluate in your decision process, and this post will start with one of them.

Factor #1 – Their VoIP pedigree

At face value, this is obvious, but there are a few layers to consider here. If you’ve been using legacy telephony a long time, it’s possible that VoIP didn’t even exist when you bought your last phone system. For richer context, this may come from a time when we didn’t have broadband, email was not yet an everyday tool, many businesses didn’t yet have websites, long distance calls were expensive and using cell phones in the workplace was unthinkable.

If any of this sounds even remotely shocking, that tells you how much the world has changed since VoIP has come along. Today, all telecom vendors offer VoIP, and many have weaned their customers off of TDM completely. Those who have not are trying to do as quickly as possible. While VoIP has become table stakes for the vendors you’ll be looking at, the pedigree among them will vary widely. This means it would be a mistake to assume they can all provide end-to-end VoIP equally well.

Today, they all can do this to a reasonable degree, but some have been toiling away at VoIP much longer than others. If you expect your needs will be plain vanilla for VoIP, then vendor selection probably won’t matter much. However, if you’re thinking longer term, you want to feel confident the chosen vendor will remain on the right side of the innovation curve.

Your current legacy phone vendor is probably steeped in TDM, especially if they’re a Tier 1. If so, then the telephony bar was set high, and you’ve become accustomed to this level over the years. In other words, you’re not migrating to VoIP because your incumbent vendor cannot deliver reliable telephony. By extension, their TDM pedigree is not in question, and you should expect no less with VoIP.

To be fair, VoIP has had a rocky history, and those vendors who have come through that will have the strongest pedigree. VoIP may be business-grade today, but only after a lot of evolution that saw many startups come and go. The early challenges of delivering a high quality, reliable real-time voice experience have been overcome, so what looks routine today is simply the byproduct of that learning process. As such, there really are two types of vendors when it comes to VoIP pedigree.

Type #1 – Legacy-based

Earlier in this series, I noted the most prominent telecom vendors for both Tier 1 and Tier 2 types. The majority of these are legacy-based, so they have a long history, both with TDM and VoIP. To be fair though, some have built their VoIP pedigree organically, largely through trial and error. Others, however, have done so via acquisition or merger.

The latter applies more to vendors who came to VoIP late, at which point it was more expedient to buy the expertise than develop it internally. Every legacy vendor has a distinct path to VoIP, and for your own comfort level, you should know how they got there.

Type #2 – IP-based

With VoIP being new, there are fewer vendors of this type, and they come to market with a different sensibility about telephony. There is a lot of freedom that comes from not having the baggage of a decades-old culture built around TDM. These companies tend to have a younger workforce, with expertise rooted almost entirely in the Internet and IP – Internet Protocol.

For them, VoIP is somewhat interesting as a service running on desk phones, but their real passion is deploying it on the Web along with other applications. Legacy vendors will counter – with some validity – that these players don’t truly understand the nature of telephony and the nuances of providing a real time service over a data network. This is a rich and ongoing point of difference, and should be further explored if these vendors are closer to what you’re being drawn to.

Conclusion

This is just a cursory look at the role of pedigree, and my intent is to raise new questions when considering the type of vendor you want to use in your VoIP migration. As you seek to address those questions, I’ll continue the analysis of what to look for in a VoIP vendor in my next post.